Let It Burn (18 page)

He was right, of course. At night, after a full shift of driving around with my eyes wide open, I’d always make a point of taking the long way home. North from the precinct, through those same neighborhoods in Detective Bateman’s “horseshoe.” Or even east or west, because there was no guarantee that we were one hundred percent right in our initial assumptions about where he was running to. In fact, I was becoming more and more convinced that I didn’t see him running up Trumbull at all. Or if I did, that he took a last-second turn and didn’t cross that bridge over the freeway. He could have doubled back and gone toward one of the neighborhoods next to Mexicantown. So that’s where I drove, down one street after another. Then I’d finally go home to Jeannie.

I wasn’t talking to her enough that month. With everything else that was going on, I should have reached out to her. But I have to admit, I just didn’t do it. I had no idea what to say. I kept it all inside me, and the next day I’d get up and do it all over again.

*   *   *

Two more weeks passed. The kids were all out of school, running around on the streets. I was still on the day shift until the end of June. The days were hot, and the nights seemed even hotter. For the first time, Sergeant Grimaldi did not so much as mention the Elana Paige case during roll call.

I was out in the car with Franklin. I was driving that day. There’s a place called Covenant House, up on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. They take care of young people who have nowhere else to go, and this wasn’t the first time we’d taken some kid up there with the vague hope it would be the right place for him or her. If it’s that or prison for some girl who’s shoplifting food from the 7-Eleven, we’d rather give the House a try first.

When we had dropped her off, I was driving back east on the boulevard. I was looking at every young face on the sidewalk, something I’d probably never stop doing for the rest of my life, especially when I was in this part of town.

“How hard did you hit this street?” Franklin said. “This was still in the target area, wasn’t it?”

“We drew a line here, actually. This is about as far north as we thought our man would come.”

“All these apartment complexes,” he said, looking out the window as we rolled past them. “That’s a lot of doors to knock on.”

“We knocked on every one. Probably twice.”

When I got to Wabash Street, I turned right and headed south.

“Where are we going? Oh, don’t tell me…”

It was late in the day, time to get back to the precinct. But there was no rule about taking the most direct route.

“You must have covered all of these neighborhoods,” he said. “This was right in the middle of the detective’s golden triangle, or whatever he called it.”

“The horseshoe. Between the freeways.”

“The horseshoe, that’s right. You must know every house by now.”

“Pretty sure I do.”

“And yet here we are.”

I came up to the first intersection. Ash Street. I slowed down, thinking to myself, the man is right, we worked the hell out of each one of these streets. This is just a waste of time.

I turned anyway.

We passed Fourteenth Street and the little corner store. Three young men were hanging around out front. I looked them over and then kept going.

We passed Fifteenth Street and then Sixteenth Street. The elementary school was closed up tight for the summer. Some more kids were hanging out on the playground equipment, violating a minor rule but nothing I was going to stop for. I looked them over and kept going.

I came to Seventeenth Street and was about to make the turn. There was only a block more, with just a few houses. Then the street dead-ended at a locked gate, with a parking lot on the other side.

I kept going straight.

“Oh, come on,” Franklin said. “You’re driving yourself crazy. You’re also going to make me late for dinner.”

He was right. I had no argument. But I kept going down that last block, already figuring I’d loop back and then head down to Butternut Street, maybe check those houses on the way because what the hell, as long as I’m there, and why did I even bother because I don’t see a soul on this street now anyway, except for that one woman hanging out the laundry.

I was two houses past before I even realized what I’d seen. I stopped the car.

“What is it?” Franklin said.

“Probably nothing,” I said, swinging the car around. “At least I didn’t ruin your shoes this time.”

I rolled back down the road slowly, the house on our left now, out my driver’s side window. It was a white two-story house with a little porch on the front. A woman was out in the side yard, hanging clothes from a line she had strung from the side of the house.

“Oh, come on,” Franklin said. “Not this game again.”

I watched her take out another pair of jeans and hang it on the line. Next to the other jeans, and the gray shirt.

“I told you,” he said. “You’re going to drive yourself crazy.”

I looked more closely at the shirt. Plain gray. Yes. But the sleeves …

No. There was no tear. Both short sleeves were perfectly intact.

“I’m sorry,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “I guess I’ll never look at a gray shirt again without doing a double take. I’ll go my whole life just waiting to see that one torn sleeve.”

I took my foot off the brake and aimed the car dead ahead. To the precinct, to civilian clothes, to dinner.

“Alex, hold up!”

I stopped the car again and looked out the window, just as the woman was pinning another gray shirt to the line. A gray shirt with one ragged short sleeve.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I went back to the Soo the next day. I needed to try out this idea, to say it out loud, hear myself saying it, see someone else’s reaction to it. Someone I could trust.

I parked on Portage Avenue, a busy street on this day, one of the last days of the tourist season. The freighters would keep running until the weather closed them down for the winter, but today was one last chance to walk through the Locks Park without a warm coat. I knew people came from all over to see these seven-hundred-footers go through the locks. I don’t totally understand the attraction, but then I live just up the bay, so I see these boats all the time.

I walked into the Soo Brewing Company. The air was heavy and the front window was steamed up, but enough light came through to make the furniture in the seating area look even further past its prime. Although I suppose the lingering aroma of the hops more than made up for it.

Leon appeared from the back room, dragging a large metal trash can. “Alex,” he said when he saw me, “two visits in two days. I knew this beer would win you over.”

“You need help with that?”

“I got it. But I bet you can’t guess where it’s going.”

I looked into the trash can and saw nothing but a soggy mass of grain. “I’m guessing the Dumpster out back?”

“Hell no. This is from the mash tun. It’s going to the buffalo ranch so they can feed it to the herd.”

“The buffalo ranch.”

“Down toward Pickford, yeah. You’ve seen them.”

“If you say so,” I said. Then I saw his coffee on the counter and realized I desperately needed one myself.

“I’ve got a pot going,” he said, before I could even ask. “I’ll get you a cup.”

A couple of minutes later, we were sitting in the front room on the beat-up couch. The cushions were shot, and I knew it would be a battle to get back on my feet, but for now I was comfortable. I took a sip of coffee.

“You don’t look like you slept a whole lot,” he said to me.

I shook my head.

“I imagine the story you told me last night has something to do with that.”

“I’m not exactly sure how I know this,” I said. “Or why I didn’t know it until now. All these years later. But I believe we put away an innocent man.”

“You believe this based on what?”

“Well, based at least partly on something I thought of in the middle of the night. You’re the one I always come to when I need help seeing something clearly, right?”

“I try.”

“You do more than try. You have a gift for it. You cut through all the clutter that gets in the way and you go right to the
one thing
that makes it all fit together. I’ve seen you do it over and over again.”

“You’re flattering me now. But go ahead.”

“When I was telling you what happened at the train station, when I was chasing Darryl King down the tracks, you stopped me and you asked me a question. Do you remember what it was?”

He thought about it for a few seconds.

“I asked you,” he said, “why the young man threw away the bracelet and not the knife.”

“Right. Which is exactly the same question I asked Detective Bateman, when he told me the story.”

“What was his answer?”

“His answer was the kid threw away the knife later, after he got home. Or he just wasn’t thinking straight at the moment. Or whatever. It really doesn’t matter, because the whole question is just one of those things that gets in the way of us seeing the situation clearly.”

He nodded his head slowly. “Okay…”

“So that’s what I realized last night. I was asking that question when I should have been asking something else.”

He raised his eyebrows, waiting for it.

“Why throw away
anything
?” I said. “What good does it do?”

“It’s incriminating. It’s a natural reaction to throw it away. When you were chasing somebody with drugs, you must have seen—”

“Them throw away bags of crack. Yes, I saw that all the time. We’d go pick it up after the arrest, and inevitably they’d say, ‘Oh, no, Officer, that’s not mine. I don’t know where that came from.’”

“So it’s the same idea here,” he said. “The kid had the bracelet, so while you were chasing him he threw it away.”

“Exactly. Now you’ve got it.”

“Got what? We’re back where we started, aren’t we?”

“No,” I said. “Now we’re somewhere else. Look…”

I noticed that he had his cell phone clipped to his belt, so I reached over and grabbed it from him.

“I just took your cell phone,” I said. “It’s much nicer than mine, after all. It probably even works up here sometimes. So now I’m going to leave before I get caught, right?”

“Yeah?”

“But wait, here comes a cop, so I’m going to throw it away.”

I tossed it onto the table.

“It wasn’t me, Officer. I have no idea how that cell phone got on that table.”

He looked at the phone, then at me.

“Now let’s say I just killed you,” I said. “And I happened to take your cell phone while I was at it. Here comes that cop. What am I going to do? If I’m still carrying around the freaking
murder weapon,
do you think I’m even
thinking
about the stupid cell phone at that point?”

“No,” he said, grabbing his phone from the table. “No, you’re not.”

“Darryl King threw away that bracelet because he had just committed the crime of taking it, so when I was chasing him he naturally threw it away. He was disassociating himself from the crime. Which I realize sounds like something you would say. Maybe you’re rubbing off on me.”

“If you look at it as a simple robbery, you mean…”

“Then it all makes sense, yes. He does exactly what you’d expect him to do.”

“So he doesn’t throw away the knife…”

“Because he doesn’t have a knife.”

Leon sat back on the couch and thought about this. I could tell he was really working it over. He started to say something, stopped himself. Started again, then stopped.

“But it is
possible
…”

“If you make up that story in your head, you can make him throw away the bracelet and keep the knife, yes. I suppose in some cases, somewhere, it’s actually happened that way. People do things that don’t make any sense.”

“But in this case…”

“In this case, I think he found a dead body. She wasn’t dead for long, because we know from the forensics that she was killed right around that same time. But he goes up there and he sees the bracelet and he takes it. Because at that point, why not? Then he leaves, and I show up and start chasing him.”

“So he throws it away,” Leon said, still thinking it over. “‘Not me. I didn’t do it. I didn’t take this from that dead woman up there…’”

I just sat there and watched him as he seemed to reenact the whole scene in his head.

“Damn,” he finally said, “that feels right. It really does.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that.”

“It’s completely unprovable, of course. Just one of those things you know in your gut. But now you try to put that up against the fact that he confessed…”

“We go back to that, yeah. Why he would just roll over and give up.”

“Instead of swearing up and down that he didn’t kill her.”

“Well, he’s getting out soon,” I said. “Maybe I can ask him.”

Leon looked at me. “You’re really thinking of doing that?”

“I might. I don’t know. It’ll probably bug me forever if I don’t.”

“That’ll be one interesting conversation,” he said. “But wait a minute. Hold the phone…”

“What is it?”

“Alex, if this Darryl King of yours didn’t kill that woman…”

“Then someone else did,” I said. “I realize that.”

“I would think
that
would keep me up at night, just as much as the thought of sending the wrong man to prison.”

“Well, thanks. Tonight I’m sure it will.”

“Seriously, what are you going to do about this? Somebody killed her and just walked away.”

I didn’t have an answer for that. Leon didn’t have an answer, either. Not a real answer. I thanked him for listening to me. Then I let him get back to work.

When I was outside again, I found myself walking through the iron gate to Locks Park. Another freighter was coming through the locks. People were standing around watching it, but it barely registered for me. I was too busy thinking about that dead woman left on that balcony in that train station, and a murderer with no face and no name, who never paid the price for his crime.

*   *   *

My honeymooners were gone from the last cabin, so I spent a couple of hours closing that up. Vinnie came by for a few minutes, then left for his shift at the casino. The sun went down, and it started to get cold. The wind was blowing hard by the time I got to the Glasgow Inn. It was just me and Jackie and a few stragglers wandering in on their way up to the Shipwreck Museum. Jackie could tell something was bothering me. He put a cold Canadian on the table next to my chair and left me alone.